Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 (49 page)

Zahlfast had recovered a little in the cold air and roused himself to look toward me. "Even dragon-fire couldn't get him out of the cellars," he said as though reading my thoughts—for all I knew, he really was. "There are artifacts down there out of the old magic, created with spells stronger than anything we can work today, that would hold off even dragons."

Something left from the old wizard Naurag, I thought. Something he'd doubtless created up in the land of magic toward the end of his life, to protect his own home in the City now that he had given away the Dragons'

Scepter, and which, along with so much else, he'd failed to mention in his ledger.

"We could just leave him down there," Evrard suggested uncertainly.

But no one else liked this plan. "You have no idea what other magical artifacts are down there," one of the teachers told Evrard sternly. "If he has gone completely renegade, he could decide to destroy half of the Western Kingdoms."

I turned to Zahlfast and knelt beside him in the street. "You knew a way into the library, Master," I said quietly, talking fast before he could reprove me again for calling him Master. "You've been at the school longer than any of us. Do you know anything—any secret passage, any spell, any magical force—that could cut through into the cellars?"

He shivered and closed his eyes. For a moment I feared he had fainted again. But when he spoke his voice, though thin, was clear. "Now that the Master is dead," he said, eyes still shut, "I know this school better than anyone. There used to be a way. I believe I can still remember the magic to find it again. It was a passage concealed with magic, shut with spells. The old Master—and the only Master, Daimbert!—and I built it years ago, a shortcut, we thought, down to the cellars and the powerful objects concealed there. I do not know that Elerius ever learned of it."

He gestured almost aimlessly. "Here. Under the street where we are now. The entrance lies under the paving stones."

"Then let's find it," I said determinedly. "If we're ever going to get Elerius out, it will have to be now, before he has a chance to build new and stronger defenses of his own."

The other teachers still looked reluctant. "I think that Zahlfast—" one said uncertainly.

The old wizard interrupted him, his voice creaky but resolute. "I think that Zahlfast wants to see if his passage is still there. I have been doing powerful spells since before you learned your first illusions, and I am not so sick that I have lost my command of wizardry! The magic to open the passage will not kill me. If Daimbert is willing to go in, then I am willing to help him find the way."

I wouldn't have characterized myself as "willing" to go in, but Zahlfast had given me no choice. Some of the other teachers lifted him out of the middle of the street, and several of us used magic to wrench paving stones up and out of the way. That was the easy part.

At first I couldn't detect any secret passage, and really didn't want to start digging around in the damp gravel, but Zahlfast seemed to know what he was doing. He leaned on his elbows, concentrating hard. And then slowly, his voice creakier than ever, he began speaking in the heavy syllables of the Hidden Language.

This was no spell I knew, though it had certain affinities to spells in the old wizard Naurag's ledger. It was enormously complex—I would have known even without hearing the strain in my old teacher's voice what effort it took to shift magic's four dimensions like this. I had planned to help, but realized immediately that while Zahlfast was moving earth and space I was best off out of the way.

As he spoke, an opening grew in the center of what had once been a street: a round opening down which the gravel rattled. It swirled momentarily, almost like an illusion, then became solid. I tried to peer down it, both with my eyes and with magic, and could find no bottom. I looked uncertainly toward Zahlfast. The light was dim, but I could see sweat standing out on his forehead in the freezing air.

"The passage is stable," he gasped. "The opening is still where I remember it, and it still leads all the way down. If you're going to go, Daimbert, go!"

"But should I—"

He shook his head without waiting for my question. He was panting now. "I don't think I can hold it open much longer. Go!"

None of the other teachers seemed ready to challenge me for the right to go down through a tunnel kept open with faltering magic, to meet a renegade wizard who intended to kill me. Already, I could see, Zahlfast was having trouble keeping his opening in place. I grabbed and squeezed his hand in case I never saw him again.

And was startled to hear his voice in my mind, as sharp and as raspy as when he spoke aloud: "Take me with you."

No time for discussion. I grabbed my old teacher around the shoulders and dove, head-first, into darkness.

A floor, faintly lit with a magical glow, came up to meet us, and I caught myself with a flying spell to land with only a small thump, setting Zahlfast down beside me.

The instant we were out of the passageway it disappeared, closing over our heads with a rumble and a last fall of gravel. The shortcut's gone, I thought, knowing Zahlfast would not have the strength to work that spell again. That meant that the only way back out was the regular way, the stairs down which Elerius must have come—and which, if they were not completely blocked by rubble, he would now be guarding.

I spun around, ready for an attack, but at first the cellars appeared rather innocuous. The corridor in which we had landed was whitewashed and fairly featureless, uniformly lit, and as dead silent as though a whole City were not built a few dozen yards above us. I strained for sounds of Elerius—or of some horror out of the Black Wars—and could hear nothing.

The rows of heavy oak doors, all closed tight and faintly glittering with magical locks, gave no hint either of menace or of the school above that had so recently been destroyed. There were none of the signs of active life and wizardry that had permeated the school: no desks with salacious spells carved into them, or books set aside with a salamander marking someone's place, or the slowly dissolving remains of an illusion, or a forgotten cup of cold tea.

Only once had I been down here, while still a student, when one of the teachers had sent me here on an errand to find another one of the faculty.

At that time a blue baby dragon had been kept in one of the cellar rooms, but I had only had a glimpse of it then, and I had heard that it had died a few years later.

Zahlfast sat catching his breath and rearranging the sheet he had wrapped around himself. It gave me a momentary shiver in its likeness to the winding sheet around a corpse, but he seemed, at least for now, somewhat stronger. "If I'd told all those other faculty members I was coming with you," he said, pleased with himself, "they would have tried to give me an argument."

"But why didn't you bring one of the more knowledgeable teachers instead of me?" I asked. "I've been off in Yurt for years, and have no way of knowing what's in these cellars. Wouldn't it have been better to have someone here who actually understood the dangers?"

He looked at me sideways from under bushy eyebrows. "No. All of the rest of the teachers understand the dangers far too well. We have at most an hour or two until Elerius starts breaking through some of the magic locks down here. I didn't want to spend that hour or two arguing that averting the potential danger to the City and all the kingdoms around was worth the very real mortal danger to ourselves."

Very real mortal danger! I thought but said nothing. After all, I had claimed all along that the only way to oppose Elerius was by being dead.

I helped Zahlfast to his feet, and we started walking slowly. He leaned on my arm, his sheet dragging behind him. "Doesn't look like Elerius has gotten over here, yet," he commented.

"What is down here, Master?" I asked, ignoring his snort when again I called him Master. "What things did the teachers find necessary to lock away from the students?"

"And sometimes each other?" he added with another snort. "The old Master started the collection, artifacts of great power that had been made by his teacher or his teacher's teacher." Naurag, I thought. "I believe there are a number of powerful objects here as well which were first created by those wizards' contemporaries. He and I always regretted that those old wizards weren't very conscientious in writing down their spells, but they were probably better than any wizard since—until Elerius."

This was a glum thought. I didn't answer.

"Then, when he started the school after the Black Wars," Zahlfast continued in his school-teacher voice, "he had all the wizards of the West bring him the weapons of terrible destruction which they had forged for use in those wars. Many he merely destroyed. For others, he carefully disentangled the spells in his search for new and different ways to order magic's four dimensions. By the time I joined him, and the school was already taking its first young wizardry pupils, all that were left were those most interesting for demonstration purposes—or those most terrible, where even the best wizard might find it difficult to control the forces such an artifact would unleash. As a one-time pupil here, I'm sure you can appreciate why we didn't want to allow the students easy access."

"Um, yes," I muttered, thinking of Evrard—and myself.

"Over the years, an occasional creature from the land of wild magic might appear in the lands of men, and some of those we captured and locked in the cellars as well. A few decades ago there was even a collecting trip up north, but it was not considered a success and not repeated."

As we slowly passed the series of identical and unmarked doors, I found myself wondering uneasily which one might hold a miniature gorgos, which an artifact second in power only to the Dragon's Sceptre, and which dark instruments of death, and hoping that the magical locks were able to hold them. If any of us emerged alive from this, proper identification tags on the doors should be a first order of business.

But then something Zahlfast had said a moment ago struck me. "You said you expected Elerius to break through the magic locks! I thought it was impossible to break one."

He gave me another sideways look. "I wondered when you would think of that. The Master decided a few years ago, when he recovered from his last serious illness, that it was a mistake to have all these doors keyed only to his palm print. Without him, none of us would ever be able to open them again. So he rekeyed them all, using two palm prints, his own and that of the faculty member he then thought most likely to succeed him—Elerius."

"But wouldn't you still need both people's hands to open the lock?"

"One should. But the magic of the lock is weaker by being divided between two hands. The old Master counted on Elerius being able to find a way to break down the spells once he himself was gone."

"Do you know how he could do that?" I asked, intrigued.

Zahlfast shook his head slowly, and when his answer came it was so quiet I almost didn't hear him. "I'm not that good a wizard."

That made two of us. We walked on in silence for a minute. I was thinking that there was at least one artifact down here to which Elerius already had access, the one with which he had threatened to destroy me.

Could he be lurking behind this door, I thought, looking both up and down the corridor, or that one? I tried a prayer to the Cranky Saint in an effort to calm my panicked heart beat. At the moment even he, bursting in with a blaze of celestial light from the realm of the supernatural, would have seemed like a friendly face.

These cellars must be solidly built; only a few cracks in wall and ceiling suggested that tons of masonry had collapsed on top of them, and the magical lights still functioned smoothly. The corridor intersected other passages, with no indication of which might lead to the stairs. We turned right at the first intersection, left at the next and the next, and in a few minutes I had lost any sense of where we had come in.

When the sound began, it was at first so faint I didn't notice it. But then I realized that neither my old teacher nor I were making a hissing sound. I looked at him questioningly, but he had already stopped, his head cocked.

"I feared as much," he said quietly. "I wondered why we had not seen him yet, if by some chance he didn't realize we were here. No, Elerius has declined to meet us."

"And that sound—" The hissing was closer now, and the temperature of the air in the corridor was dropping rapidly.

"When he decided to break a magic lock, he did not choose a door at random. He chose one door on purpose. I thought it might take him two hours, but I overestimated. He has it unlocked now."

Zahlfast leaned more heavily on me, and we waited as that sound slowly approached. "Whatever you do, Daimbert," he said between his teeth, "do not look it in the eye."

The corridor walls on either side were now white with frost. Even the cold could not conceal the smell that began sliding toward us, a smell like an open grave. Added to the hissing came a constant click-click, of talons against the floor.

Ahead of us another corridor crossed the one in which we stood. The magic lamps that lit the cellars cast a shadow, a shadow of the creature which proceeded it past the corner: not very big for something of such horror, it walked on chicken legs, feathered wings emerging stiffly from its sides, but its head and tail were those of a serpent.

A basilisk. A creature of wild magic that should never have come to the land of men in the first place, and if it could not be destroyed should have been permanently locked away. And now Elerius had loosed it on us, and, after it had frozen us or turned us to stone, it would find its way out to do the same to the rest of the people in the City.

"Do not meet its eye," said Zahlfast again, just as the serpent head came around the corner.

Shivering uncontrollably, I stood as stiff and motionless as though the basilisk's gaze had already turned me to stone. My own eyes averted, I heard its taloned feet coming steadily toward us.

They freeze the air around them, I remembered from a long-ago lecture held in a classroom that no longer existed. They turn to stone those who meet their jeweled eyes. And they bite with the bite of death those they neither freeze nor transform to stone.